Keep pushing the BBC - they're wobbling

I wouldn't wish redundancy on anyone who doesn't welcome it, so there is no rejoicing at the downsizing of some 520 news staff now starting at the BBC. But for those fortunate enough to keep a job at the woke behemoth, it's only the foretaste of the chill wind that will blow. I have a feeling in my bones that peak woke has passed, in the UK anyway, and we are now tentatively starting on the pushback.

Charles Moore in the Telegraph describes perfectly today how the BBC has become the enemy of the decent majority in the UK. Moore is old enough to remember a Fleet Street ruled by the tyranny of print unions that had 'captured' the nationals. In those pre-internet, four-channel days of warbling Trimphones the 'Sun' sold some three or four million copies daily - or it did when the chapels allowed it to be printed. Rupert Murdoch and Margaret Thatcher fought that battle. We now need to fight the same battle to end the woke tyranny spearheaded by the BBC - a tyranny that has spread like a plague

Nowhere is this alliance between militant wokery and management cowardice more obvious than in the civil service. Diversity is a tool of producer capture. It allows aeons of management time to be spent thinking about the composition of the workforce rather than the needs of the “consumer” – the Government and the voters who elect it.

I was recently informed that a concept called “reverse mentoring” has entered the civil service. Senior staff of 30 years’ experience are each assigned to a young employee in, say, IT, who observes them at work and reports on whether they exhibit “unconscious bias”, “micro-aggressions”, and other sins which cry to Heaven for vengeance.

The Spectator this week carried several pieces -  one by Stephen Daisley cuts to the heart of the BBC's vulnerability, that having abandoned impartiality it has forfeited its place in the institutional Pantheon

The BBC has a different role, one so important that we are compelled by law to fund it. Yes, it informs, educates and entertains but, as I have argued on CoffeeHouse before, its real service is to national unity. The Corporation cannot unite us while becoming a mouthpiece for one side of a culture war.

Douglas Murray pens a hard-hitting piece for the Speccie, which also featured the resignation letter from Bari Weiss, forced from her job at the New York Times.  Murray writes

Publications like the NYT, who profess to be most opposed to ‘fake news’, continuously turn out to have been the era’s biggest purveyors of the thing they complain of. And campaigning journalists, imagining that they are acting in the name of decency, turn out to behave so indecently that they bully out a minority, dissenting opinion from their ranks.

And indeed Charles Moore is amongst those that make direct comparisons between the NYT and the disgraceful witch-hunts at the BBC such as those championed by Emily Maitlis. Andrew Neil's position at PHG effectively makes him the Speccie's Chairman, a job that has no editorial control, but has nevertheless provoked ill-informed probing, which may have found ears within the woke echo-bubble that is W1A - for Neil's outstanding politics programme itself fell victim to the corporation's axe. 

Elsewhere, the TPA carries a piece on the BBC's appalling waste - a throwback to the Fleet Street printworks that carried hundreds of unnecessary printworkers when the job could be done by a few dozens, even printing three million papers a day. Which reminds me that I visited the Wapping works back in the 1980s one chill dark November night as the Sun was being printed and one thing that struck me, apart from the size of the rolls of paper, was how much machinery there was, and how few people.

Finally, the rapid growth, funding and public support for the #DefundTheBBC movement must be causing a few wobbles in W1A - Calvin Robinson in Spiked gives an inside view.

It seems the BBC has stumbled into the cardinal error for a news organisation - that of becoming the news, rather than reporting it.

Dimbleby no better than a thief

Throughout Africa, the delusion of corrupt rulers and their apparatchiks that underpins and pervades their thefts is that the organs and instruments of the State somehow belong to them because they exercise power. If you're the Nigerian Minister of Petroleum, they reckon, surely that means you're entitled to more than everyone else's share of the black gold? Why, stealing those millions must be practically legal.

And so with Dimbleby and the hereditary BBC establishment. They think they own it. They don't. Dimbleby's claim to speak for the BBC is no more and no less than mine or yours, no greater or lesser than any British citizen who has paid for every VT editing machine, every redhead light, every executive conference suite, every sound mixer and every HD camera. We all own an equal share, and we all have an equal right to an opinion about the future of the BBC.

The petulance and fury exhibited by Dimbleby and his dags is because of their grossly distorted sense of entitlement and displays a contempt for the rest of us. You don't own the BBC, Mr Dimbleby, and to pretend that you do is theft.

A new chance for the BBC after the TV Tax

Back on 10th December we faced the ballot box having witnessed the most disgraceful and unprofessional reporting ever seen of the election campaign by the BBC. Our national broadcaster was no longer interested in fair and balanced reporting or skillfully eliciting the views of politicians; it had become a platform for the woke metropolitan elitist views of its staff. BBC interviews were about the interviewer, not the interviewee. We saw Marr with a machine-gun list of peremptory questions that gave the Prime Minister just a few seconds to collect his thoughts and begin his answer to each before the next demand was thrust at him. Marr no doubt preened at his petty victory - but on 10th December I predicted the fall of the BBC -

The Prime Minister clearly has a strategy. First, de-criminalise non-payment of the TV tax. This doesn't mean, as some MSM commenters have assumed, that payment would be voluntary - only that recovery would become a civil, not criminal matter. The 180,000 people every year hitherto prosecuted by the BBC in the magistrates' court would in future be defendants in the county court. As many of these simply can't afford the TV tax, the BBC has been happy until now to land them with a criminal conviction and fine, including a compulsory £15 'victim surcharge'. Those paying it are often foodbank users - the prosecutor is a £4bn a year behemoth. Just who is the victim here?

Using bailiffs or other recovery methods to enforce county court judgements for such low value debts will clearly challenge the BBC. TV footage of bailiffs seizing the pathetic belongings of the poorest and most vulnerable in our society (obviously this will not be shown on the BBC ...) will further turn the public against the broadcaster; cameras are banned from the magistrates courts, so their vindictiveness is currently hidden.

Well yesterday the DCMS launched a public consultation on decriminalising the TV Tax and I'd urge all of you to respond to it. I am not as sure as is Allister Heath in the Telegraph that the result is not in doubt -

Quite rightly, non-payment of the licence fee will be decriminalised in two years’ time (rarely has the outcome of a “consultation” been in so little doubt) and the licence fee itself will go by 2027. The Government won’t stop the BBC reimposing the fee on over-75s, a decision which will further reduce support for it.

You will note that in all the BBC's online reporting of the DCMS consultation, it never once provides a link to the government website where viewers and listeners can make their views heard. That is hardly the behaviour of a broadcaster committed to serving the public.

There is an alternative to the TV Tax that will allow the BBC to retain much of its Public Service Broadcaster ethos - not the Netflix model, but the HBO model. HBO currently has operating revenue of £1.5bn a year for a worldwide service - and I think a remodelled BBC could achieve something similar. I have been consistently impressed by HBO's output. Netflix, which costs me €7.99 a month, contains around 85% of unwatchable low-quality crap of interest only to teenagers or morons but is worth it for the 15% of decent-quality output. The BBC's ultra-woke preachy, skewed and distorted output is not of interest even to teenagers any longer, so it needs to change if it is to survive.

The BBC: Managing decline

Tony Hall's deliberately designed surprise resignation was timed for one reason only - to allow the nation's biggest woke tax bludger, if it chooses, to mobilise for war with the government and people of Britain. The BBC faces the 2022 mid term review and the critical 2027 Charter renewal in the unique position of not only facing a hostile Conservative government, but having lost public support. The Thatcher government tried to muzzle the BBC with little success because at that time Auntie enjoyed widespread public backing - but the BBC of the 1980s was not the BBC of the 20-teens. Then we took Only Fools and Horses to our hearts - it could simply not be made today by the BBC unless it starred a disabled lesbian and Rodney was Sudanese.

De-criminalising non-payment of the licence fee would be a good first step from 2022. On compassionate grounds alone, criminalising the poor, over 70% of whom are women, for failing to pay the TV tax at a time when the deeply flawed UC system forces many to use food banks is simply morally unjustifiable. The BBC cannot continue to use its force and power to persecute so many of the most vulnerable in our society.

Allison Pearson does a reasonable job in the Telegraph this morning of capturing our feelings at what must now be the managed decline of the BBC; a certain regret, a nostalgia for the good times in the past, but a recognition that it has developed behavioural problems that mean we can no longer give it house-room. She writes

If you look at an electoral map of Britain, amid a vast sea of Tory blue, there are a few small islets of Labour red. Those islets are where BBC staff live and from which they draw their ideas......To justify demanding a TV tax from every household, you have to truly speak for the nation, not an elite corner of London.

The selection of Tony Hall's successor will tell us much about how the BBC will face its nemesis; in co-operation with the government and people, managing decline to ensure the best is saved and the worst woke waste is ditched, or whether they want a high-profile showdown during which they will lose even more public support and risk fouling the brand for all time. 

Time to come to heads with the BBC over bias

Nominations are open this week for Select Committee chairs and the appointments and memberships of the committees could be interesting. At a time when the Conservatives have a stonking majority in the House, the opposition will seek to use the Select Committees to win media airtime. You will remember the Brexit Committee during the last session, under the Chairmanship of Hilary Benn, with 14 remainiacs dominating the 7 leavers and including Joanna Cherry and Stephen Kinnock. They lost no opportunity in piling onto pro-Brexit victims and in calling every Project Fear crank and nutter to listen with smiles and nods at their inflated drivel.

Well, no doubt you'll be pleased to learn that the Brexit Committee is back, and still to be chaired by Labour. Whatever fond wishes the Prime Minister had about relegating Brexit to obscurity after the end of the month and concentrating on trade deals will be dashed - the Brexit Committee will see it as their chosen mission to Keep Brexit Alive. There may well even be a SecondReferendumber or two sitting. Their task will be to seize on every minor glitch in negotiations (there will be many) and to summon ministers with the sole objective of seeking to bully and humiliate them. I don't know how Parliament can deal with this.

The Committee will be encouraged no doubt by the eagerness of the BBC in giving them disproportionate airtime - and we must make this a subject of intense scrutiny and complaint, possibly even legal action. There are 28 Select Committees. An unbiased, fair and objective reporting of Parliament's activities would balance reporting of the activities of them all. If the BBC gives undue eminence to the anti-Brexit activities of one single Select Committee, the organisation's access to Parliament should be suspended. It's time to get serious about embedded BBC bias.

Here is the full list of Chairs up for nomination this week -

Backbench Business Committee (non-Government)
Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Labour)
Defence (Conservative)
Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Conservative)
Education (Conservative)
Environmental Audit (Conservative)
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Conservative)
Exiting the European Union (Labour)
Foreign Affairs (Conservative)
Health and Social Care (Conservative)
Home Affairs (Labour)
Housing, Communities and Local Government (Labour)
International Development (Labour)
International Trade (Scottish National Party)
Justice (Conservative)
Northern Ireland Affairs (Conservative)
Petitions (Labour)
Procedure (Conservative)
Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs (Conservative)
Public Accounts (Labour)
Science and Technology (Conservative)
Scottish Affairs (Scottish National Party)
Standards (Labour)
Transport (Conservative)
Treasury (Conservative)
Welsh Affairs (Conservative)
Women and Equalities (Conservative)
Work and Pensions (Labour)

The fall of the BBC

The BBC's initial reaction to competition, when I was young, was to destroy it using the organisation's privileged broadcasting power. Thus was the entire Anglian region under 25 years old converted to Radio Caroline, the plucky gang on the trawler just beyond the UK 3-mile limit that broadcast defiance to the authoritarian BBC. Of course the organisation could not maintain a broadcasting oligopoly as technology advanced; demands for bits of the FM spectrum from a multitude of independent radio stations, the rise of analogue satellite TV and video rental. The BBC fought a rearguard action with some success until the internet came along. Then it was all over.

The BBC has been a long time dying. Its demise was on the cards, according to Parkinson's law, when it spent hundreds of millions on swish new headquarters, studios and executive office refurbishment. Big beasts take a long time to fall, and the BBC may still be with us after the next Charter renewal in 2027, but the era of expansion and an ever-increasing TV tax enforced through criminal law is coming to an end.

The Prime Minister clearly has a strategy. First, de-criminalise non-payment of the TV tax. This doesn't mean, as some MSM commenters have assumed, that payment would be voluntary - only that recovery would become a civil, not criminal matter. The 180,000 people every year hitherto prosecuted by the BBC in the magistrates' court would in future be defendants in the county court. As many of these simply can't afford the TV tax, the BBC has been happy until now to land them with a criminal conviction and fine, including the compulsory £15 'victim surcharge'. Those paying it are often foodbank users - the prosecutor is a £4bn a year behemoth. Just who is the victim here?

Using bailiffs or other recovery methods to enforce county court judgements for such low value debts will clearly challenge the BBC. TV footage of bailiffs seizing the pathetic belongings of the poorest and most vulnerable in our society (obviously this will not be shown on the BBC ...) will further turn the public against the broadcaster; cameras are banned from the magistrates courts, so their vindictiveness is currently hidden.

I expect there will be some sort of eminent, independent cross-party review of the Charter and its irrelevance in an age of digital diversity. There will be fudges and special interests will be accommodated. Expensive and unwieldy compromises will be enacted. It will take time. But this is the beginning of the end for the BBC as it is now, and the impact of its fall will smash the chains as effectively as did Stalin's gigantic statues when they toppled.

You really might enjoy this - Boris' final election video

Marred

After this election campaign, the role of broadcasters will never be again as it was. Any reasonable person who watched Marr trying to humiliate the Prime Minister yesterday, without success, cannot fail to conclude that the usefulness of these things has passed. Marr was simply not interested in answers, only with throwing like spears as many barbed, distorted and wounding questions as possible, rat-tat-tat. As soon as Boris was deflecting the last one another was launched. It was not an edifying spectacle.

I can't quite track how the broadcasters assumed that they held this power and authority over our elected representatives - and by extension, assume they hold the same power and authority over we who elected them. But they are grievously mistaken. It's fine for us to disparage, undermine, scrutinise, reform and dismiss the elected political class- we're the voters. It's not fine for the broadcasters to impertinently pretend that they're acting in our name when in fact they're acting for a political establishment now under threat and fighting us for control of the nation. They're not acting for us, or for higher ideals, but for their own power and interest. And this election is the event that has called them out.

We don't elect a President in this country but representatives who ally themselves to a party. If the broadcasters have a job at all it is to present and probe the parties - taking whomever the party decides to put up to the microphone. If they imagine their job is that of attack dogs, establishing their own dominance and authority by savaging individual prominent politicians, they are mistaken. That's our job, not theirs.

The BBC's hubris will lead to nemesis

Channel Four news has broadcast footage of their reporters being scoffed at and refused interviews by both Boris and Arron Banks - the Arron footage is classic. They imagined that the public would be outraged that politicians had dared to defy the power of the news, but instead most folk just shrugged. Everyone knows that C4 News is deeply biased against both the Conservatives and Brexit - what do they expect?

When Boris went straight to Facebook to take public questions the BBC's Nick Robinson accused him of using methods common to dictators "down the ages". Up to a point, Nick - only those from the 20th century onwards, surely. Unless Tiberius had technology available to him we know nothing about. Robinson's jejune petulance and public silliness was because Boris had shown that ministers don't need the BBC.

The only reason a government minister gives a TV or radio interview is if their government / party gets more out of it than it costs them. There is no public right for angry Remainer journalists to harangue, insult, bully and demean their Brexit opponents in public just because they have control of the airwaves. There is certainly no obligation on anyone in public life to subject themselves to it.

The BBC's naked bias over Brexit has cost it the right to be a national broadcaster funded by the licence fee. The Charter must not be renewed in 2027 - and the sooner the lumbering behemoth adapts for life after the TV tax, the less the grief for all. 

BBC Charter renewal 2027

The BBC's charter - the agreement that allows the organisation to collect income from a TV Tax - is due for renewal from 2027. Since the millennium, the world has moved on rapidly. The way in which people obtain and use broadcast output has shifted radically. Technology has enabled low cost, high quality commercial streaming; device quality and capability has made quantum leaps. We started the millennium watching Blair and the BBC bring in the new year on a TV set in the corner of the room; today, the flat screen mounted on the chimney-breast shows only Netflix.

Many are now questioning whether it's not now time to end the BBC charter. It's time to start the national debate. So let's kick off with the Five 'Public Purposes' which have been at the heart of the BBC's unique and privileged position and see how they've been doing. Here are the objectives, and here are my rankings. What are yours?

The Public Purposes of the BBC are as follows. 

(1) To provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them: the BBC should provide duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world. Its content should be provided to the highest editorial standards. It should offer a range and depth of analysis and content not widely available from other United Kingdom news providers, using the highest calibre presenters and journalists, and championing freedom of expression, so that all audiences can engage fully with major local, regional, national, United Kingdom and global issues and participate in the democratic process, at all levels, as active and informed citizens.

(2) To support learning for people of all ages: the BBC should help everyone learn about different subjects in ways they will find accessible, engaging, inspiring and challenging. The BBC should provide specialist educational content to help support learning f or children and teenagers across the United Kingdom. It should encourage people to explore new subjects and participate in new activities through partnerships with educational, sporting and cultural institutions.

(3) To show the most creative, highest quality and distinctive output and services: the BBC should provide high-quality output in many different genres and across a range of services and platforms which sets the standard in the United Kingdom and internationally. Its services should be distinctive from those provided elsewhere and should take creative risks, even if not all succeed, in order to develop fresh approaches and innovative content.

(4) To reflect, represent and serve the diverse communities of all of the United Kingdom’s nations and regions and, in doing so, support the creative economy across the United Kingdom: the BBC should reflect the diversity of the United Kingdom both in its output and services. In doing so, the BBC should accurately and authentically represent and portray the lives of the people of the United Kingdom today, and raise awareness of the different cultures and alternative viewpoints that make up its society. It should ensure that it provides output and services that meet the needs of the United Kingdom’s nations, regions and communities. The BBC should bring people together for shared experiences and help contribute to the social cohesion and wellbeing of the United Kingdom. In commissioning and delivering output the BBC should invest in the creative economies of each of the nations and contribute to their development.

(5) To reflect the United Kingdom, its culture and values to the world: the BBC should provide high-quality news coverage to international audiences, firmly based on British values of accuracy, impartiality, and fairness. Its international services should put the United Kingdom in a world context, aiding understanding of the United Kingdom as a whole, including its nations and regions where appropriate. It should ensure that it produces output and services which will be enjoyed by people in the United Kingdom and globally.

BBC Lies, Distortion and fear mongering

A better example of BBC lies and distortion than the '45,000 cows to be culled because of Brexit' I have yet to find. 'Newsnight' put the story out as part of an ongoing and now quite open bias that has seen almost all BBC news output propagating silly 'Project Fear' stories. Even the ex-minister Robert Goodwill in the clip rubbished the story. The first 3 or 4 minutes of this lying rubbish are sufficient.



The simple facts are these. A third of Northern Ireland's milk currently goes to the Republic for processing, largely into cheese. The Republic then exports some 80,000 tonnes of cheddar a year made in part with this milk back into the UK*. After Brexit, there will be a 40% tariff on the milk going south and a 40% tariff on the Cheddar coming into the UK. Of course it won't continue.

The solution of course is very simple - if the EU remain obdurate and refuse to see sense, in no short time some enterprising individual will throw up a cheese factory in the province, making 80,000 tonnes a year of cheddar from UK milk for UK consumption. Result? Jobs, wealth, GDP and taxes for the UK - gainers - and job losses, benefit costs, tax shortfalls and falling GDP for the Republic - losers.

Whilst the new Ulster cheese factories are under construction, the government could buy the milk and give it away to schools, hospitals, food banks, the elderly and so on.

Do the people of Ireland really want us to come to this? Isn't it about time ordinary Irish voters told Varadkar to stop posing and get back to his Kylie fan club posters?

* It takes 10 litres of milk to make 1kg of cheddar, so the 700m - 800m litres of milk exported from North to South each year makes 70,000 - 80,000 tonnes of cheese - almost exactly equivalent to the UK's Cheddar imports from Ireland.

BBC TV Tax thugs will kill the old

I must admit that when resident in the UK I always paid the TV Tax. To save my buyer from harassment and intimidation from the TV Tax Stasi, I wrote them a letter telling them I had moved and giving them my new address. Outside the UK.

Letters are still powerful - you, the writer, are in control of the process. 'They' want to force you to use their channels - an impenetrable web form, an eternity on a 'helpline', but you subvert the whole process with a letter to the company secretary at the registered head office. Thus have I always terminated phone, utility, broadband and other contracts with wolves and didacts. And civil law is behind you - our pre-EU law has survived intact, making any contract term requiring you to use the firm's contact channels unenforceable. Your letter - with no return channel volunteered except your address, requiring them to write back - can always quite legally give the required notice and request a final account. They hate it.

My letter to the TV Tax Stasi neatly avoided all the bullying of their chosen channels, all their weaselling for information for which they have no right to ask. I had completely forgotten that I paid annually by direct debit, and laughed when I got their airmailed letter telling me that they had refunded my account for several months. That must have hurt.

Twitter is exposing the repugnant methods the BBC Stasi are using to collect their tax - threats, lies. fake stamps, letters made to look like bailiffs' demands or even post office red 'not delivered' cards. And yesterday they confirmed that their thugs would be calling on the over 75s to remind them that they must scrape together the cash for the BBC's TV Tax or be criminally prosecuted. It's the sort of loutish bullying that Ann Robinson or Esther Rantzen used to expose on, erm, the BBC. And it won't take long for the first frail oldie to die of shock and fright.

So I can only recommend that those approaching the age of 75 - say all of you over 40 - write to the BBC (recorded delivery is good) querying the new arrangements and asking for more information. Don't bother with a phone number or email address. And remind them that you can't receive casual callers.

Oh. And you can't visit the BBC TV Tax office at Darlington DL98 1TL - it doesn't exist. Try it on google maps. I presume the post office intercept the mail and redirect it to the real, secret, address. The only thing of interest is a small probably 18th century building with oriel windows next to the Kebab and Grill. If there are any very wealthy BBC haters reading, I would love to restore this gorgeous little building and install a 'BBC TV Tax Advice Centre' on the ground floor staffed by local volunteers. Over 75 preferred.

 Update
======
The real home of the BBC TV Tax? - Crapita, India Mill, Darwen

Capita, Darwen - the origin of the BBC TV Tax thugmail

Why Boris' £350m a week is about right

It's extraordinary that folk who can't read a P&L a/c or balance sheet are suddenly experts in accounting, but the media is full of remoaners who are striving to shoot down the figure, referenced by Boris Johnson in his post-Brexit vision paper.

Amongst the remoaners is some bloke who says he is head of statistics. I've read his silly letter - which has been shot down by Boris. His basic error was in answering the claims made during the referendum rather than what Boris had written, and not actually reading what Boris had written before writing his own fatuous missive. The rebuttal from the Orwellian BBC Department of Truth shows that in fact the EU is paying the UK £50m a week, and that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden. 

Folks, for the truth go to the EU budget pages. Not what the BBC or the remoaner statistics manager thinks the figure should be, but the actual EU official figures. 

For anyone who works for the BBC, let me explain. Our gross contribution, before the rebate, is £24,337.2m€. We get a 6m€ rebate which brings the contribution down to a net 18,209.4m€ a year, or €350m a week. 

We also collect €4.27bn a year in VAT and duty for goods landing in the UK but passing through to elsewhere in the EU. You could argue that some of this would remain after Brexit and that this should be added to the €18bn. 

Either way, what Boris actually claimed about the £350m a week was broadly true - the figure was close, and yes, we will regain control of how it's spent.

Yet more lies from the False News BBC

Booker details in the Telegraph the heinous falsification of historical fact on Kirsty Wark's Newsnight. The lie propagated in the programme was that the 2m deaths upon partition - Hindu on Muslim, Sikh on Muslim, Muslim on Hindu and Sikh, rape, murder and carnage - were all the fault of the British for partitioning the Indian Empire into India and East and West Pakistan. 

No doubt this is not just BBC fake news but the lies are taught in schools to children of Indian and Pakistani immigrants. 

As Booker points out, it was the Muslim leader Jinnah who refused to accept a single nation and insisted on lines on a map dividing Hindu India from Muslim Pakistan and which led directly to an ocean of blood and 2m slaughtered across the subcontinent. 

Even the BBC cannot get away with telling a lie this big.

BBC - Just Lies, no Secrets

If you rely solely on the BBC for your news, you could be forgiven for understanding that the civil disturbances rocking the southern US were protests by pro-Trump white supremacists against something unspecified. With a headline 'Charlottesville: Virginia governor tells white supremacists: 'Go home'', you need to read down past the emotive picture to the tenth paragraph to get a clue as to what the protests are about. To get an idea of just how distorted the BBC's coverage is, try the story in the New York Times 'White Nationalists Wield Torches at Confederate Statue Rally' 

It's not just Virginia. In New Orleans the white Mayor is overseeing the removal of Confederate statues which, it is alleged, promote white supremacism. There can be no excusing the vile treatment of black people in the southern states, from the lynchings and corrupt disenfranchisements to segregated buses and the evils still prevalent during my youth. But one needs to understand that not everyone with some regard for the losing side in America's divisive civil war is a racist white supremacist, and not everyone who thinks that book burning and statue destruction are wrong is a violent nationalist.

The figures of one notorious white slave-owner seem safe for now; no one is tearing down statues of George Washington. Yet.

General Robert E Lee was greatly loved by his men, even in defeat. One needs to understand the place he still holds in the respect and affections of many southerners to begin to understand the complex emotions invoked in tearing down his statue in Virginia. All of which is of no interest to the BBC, who have just used the story in their agitprop war against those who disagree with their own values and worldview. 

But those of my age will recall a different BBC screening the Dukes of Hazzard, a comedy programme about, as the BBC would explain now, white supremacists. Only they weren't, of course. It was also about their car, General Lee. It was rubbish, but objectively more accurate than the BBC news you are reading today. 

Civilisation

Kenneth Clark's original 'Civilisation' documented a linear progression from Egyptian Pharaohs to Edwardian London in which the birth and death of Christ, the son of God, enabled advances in linear Civilisation not possible before.  Clark was pretty clear about what constituted civilisation. Worshipping a stick or a bit of rock, wiping your arse with your hand or enslaving the folk from the next village didn't cut it. Everywhere, Clark's civilisation was evidenced by advances, by making and building and discovering, by art, construction, thought, literature, technology and societies and cultures benefitting from the Christian virtues. 

The BBC is going to remake the series, which inevitably means a few hours of spewy, nauseous garbage overloaded with moral relativism that will fail utterly to understand what Civilisation means. Yes, the BBC will say, worshipping a tribal stick, smearing your body in mud and beating out a bass beat with a rock and a log is just as civilised as a Thomas Tallis sung Eucharist in a gothic cathedral; and sawing someone's head off for laughing at your holy rock or throwing them off a cliff for eating shrimps on Wednesday in contravention of the Prophet Glob's teaching just as civilised as reading Goethe by candlelight to the sound of a woodwind quartet. 

Above all, the BBC will try to convince us that Islam means civilisation. They will point to the architectural glories of Moorish Spain and to Arabic advances in medicine, algebra and astrology that all bloomed briefly and were absorbed into Western civilisation before leaving Islamic north Africa and the Middle East as a primitive, backwards and uncivilised shithole. Only they'll stop at the blooming stage and try to ascribe Islam's historic virtues to the nasty, brutish and bestial mess of evil, torture and death that Salafist Islam now projects across the world. 

In other words, before viewing even a second of the BBC's nauseous new trash I know exactly what disinformation, what distortion, what omission and what outright lies it will embody and project. It will be crude propaganda, paid for by public taxes, and it will fail.  

BBC & RT news rivalry can only benefit the public

The chap criticising RT on the Today programme declared that it was a state-sponsored national broadcaster subject to government control and which represented the views of the establishment, before pausing awkwardly for a second or two as the leaden weight of the irony filled his soul. It was, I imagine, as he glanced about him with a sinking feeling knowing where he was and who was broadcasting his opinion.  Yes, of course RT and the BBC are equivalents; of course both broadcast untruths and of course both represent the view of their controlling establishment through biased production values that no-one is advised to take at face value. 

And that is exactly why their news rivalry is of the greatest public benefit. With RT exposing the BBC's fake news and the BBC doing likewise to false RT stories, by flicking between them one can get an approximation of the reality. 

The watershed was Aleppo and the BBC's mythical White Helmets reporting from the besieged enclave. Except they weren't there. They didn't exist. No-one there had seen them, and when the final rump of rebel fighters surrendered there was no trace of them. Either they escaped to Idlib disguised as rebel fighters - hardly the behaviour of an aid organisation - or they were never there in the first place. Despite which the BBC continued to broadcast their fake accounts of life under siege until near the end, accounts in all probability originating no further from White City than Vauxhall. 

Have you heard a single mention of the White Helmets since the fall of Aleppo? It's as though the MSM has realised that the secret is out and is desperate for people to forget all the past lies. 

Back at the height of the Cold War I used to tune to Radio Moscow on a short-wave valve radio receiver whose qualities I now greatly miss; the xylophone gongs of the 'Moscow Nights' station ident before the news quavered over the ether, with an impression of great distance. The Soviet news if all was well would be predictably dull; a speech from the Agriculture Convention of the 34th Plenary of the Uzhbek Soviet, mine production output gains in Novobyersk and so on. The absence of war rhetoric was, at the time, some sort of assurance that the 4 minutes had not yet arrived. 

Now forty years on we're back in the same place - trying desperately to find the truth in the ground between the liars. 

Post-credulous audience hears evidence of fake news broadcast by post-truth BBC

The video link provided by a commentor in the post below is a scorcher. At a UN press conference, independent Canadian journo Eva Bartlett demolishes the credibility of the fake news from Aleppo promulgated by, amongst others, the Guardian and the BBC.

"..what you hear in the corporate media, and I will name them – BBC, Guardian, the New York Times etc. – on Aleppo is also the opposite of reality"

In a devastating surgical dissection, Bartlett dismisses the BBC's main source of news in Aleppo - one man in Coventry, with an agenda, who calls himself 'Syrian Observatory for Human Rights'. She points out that there are NO international humanitarian organisations in rebel-held Aleppo and NO credible independent sources of news from there. The White Helmets are exposed as an armed partisan force funded by $100m from the US / EU / UK who fake news footage (documented) and are, I strongly suspect, a thin cover for arms shipments to the rebels and for western intelligence organisations.

There is NO evidence, she points out, that the White Helmets have ever been in rebel-held areas of Aleppo at all. Such news is fake.

Bartlett appeared before fellow international journalists, all of whom had full opportunity to question her and require evidence. She comes out as honest, sane and very credible - and the post-truth BBC and Guardian come out as shabby liars and charlatans.

"So they [the White Helmets] are not credible. The SOHR are not credible. 'Unnamed activists' are not credible. Once or twice maybe, but every time? Not credible. So your sources on the ground – you don't have them. You ask why we aren't seeing this. This relates to the other gentleman's question about why most of the corporate media are telling lies about Syria. It's because this is the agenda; if they had told the truth about Syria from the beginning, we wouldn't be here now. We wouldn't have seen so many people killed."

I commend this video. Make a coffee, take a break and play.